MOXIE produces 6 – 10 grams of oxygen per hour under the conditions of the Martian atmosphere.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA — Instruments on board the cruiser Perseverance of the American Space Agency (NASA) has achieved the goal of creating at least 6 grams of oxygen per hour under the conditions of the Martian atmosphere. This amount is approximately equal to that produced by one tree on Earth. At its peak, the device produces up to 10 grams of O2 per hour.
The Mars In-Situ Oxygen Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) has been producing oxygen from the CO2-rich Martian atmosphere since April 2021. Experiment results MOVED managed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is published in the journal The progress of science.
MIT researchers are conducting seven experimental trials starting in 2021. The experiments show that lunchbox-sized MOXIEs can produce at least 6 grams of breathable oxygen under a variety of atmospheric conditions, day or night, and during different Martian seasons.
“We’ve learned many things that will inform future systems at larger scales,” said Michael Hecht, principal investigator of the MOXIE mission at MIT’s Haystack Observatory. CosmosWednesday (7/9/2022).
MOXIE is the first example of “in situ resource utilization”, the use of planetary resources to generate a resource supply on Mars.
“This is the first demonstration that you actually take a resource on the surface of another planetary body and chemically convert it into something that will be useful for human missions,” said MOXIE deputy principal investigator Jeffrey Hoffman, a professor at MIT.
MOXIE is small and designed to only run for a short time. The Martian atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide, making it toxic to humans.
MOXIE draws in Martian air, filtering out contaminants. After the air is pressurized and heated to 800 degrees Celsius, it is passed through an electrolyser which uses a catalyst such as nickel to split the CO2 in the air into oxygen ions (charged oxygen atoms) and carbon monoxide (CO ).
Electricity is used to recombine oxygen ions, producing breathable molecular oxygen, O2.
“The nice thing about MOXIE is that, oxygen-wise, all you need is atmosphere,” says Hoffman.
“So no matter where you are, you can go wherever you want and you have a vibe.”
However, large-scale MOXIE must produce 2-3 kilograms of breathable oxygen per hour. Every six months, the amount of CO2 that can be converted decreases as it freezes in the planet’s polar ice caps.
So far, MOXIE has shown that the instrument can produce oxygen at nearly any time of the Martian day and year.
“The only thing we haven’t shown is running at dawn or dusk, when the temperature changes dramatically,” says Hecht.
One of the unknown factors is the effect such oxygen production would have on the Martian environment. This is because CO2 is the main component of the Martian atmosphere and plays a very important role in its seasonal cycle. There is still much to learn about the exact implications of what will happen if humans start to alter this balance between surface and atmospheric CO2.
